


I Am Tormented

by VinHampton



Category: Original Work, Sherlock (TV)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-02
Updated: 2014-06-02
Packaged: 2018-02-03 03:57:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 859
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1730261
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VinHampton/pseuds/VinHampton
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A look back on psychosis.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Am Tormented

I am tormented by memory. I am tormented, I know, by a series of electrical impulses, firing up, lighting up different parts of my brain. I know that memories are a fiction; that our recollection is selective and edited, and re-edited whenever re-visited. 

I suffered from psychosis. Perhaps I still do – we are not quite sure whether I am out of the woods yet. My doctor seems to think I am no longer a danger to myself or to others. 

I am tormented by identity: the concept of it, the texture of it. Are we what we do? Are we what we think? Are we a new archetype from one instant to the next? I don’t know who I am anymore. I used to be a weapon. I kept my body and my mind at the sharpest possible level. Now I bake muffins and fall asleep curled up beside the man who should be my nemesis. And I oscillate between bliss and resentment, and sometimes an unsettling fusion of the two. 

Without a doubt, he has won, if the game we are referring to is the old game – cat versus mouse. Catch me if you can. He asked me to yield, and I yielded. And if I could go back I would probably do it again. Probably. But the expense was massive, more than I bargained for. I feel conflicted, I feel tormented, and I have persistent nightmares and strange, dull aches in my bones. And I wonder whether it would have been any different if I had been the one who’d won. What if he’d changed for me instead? Would he have lost his mind too? Is it unfair of me to have these thoughts? I made the choice; it was a free choice. Two strong, opposing forces cannot occupy the same space without a reaction as strong as the sum of their parts. 

I look at the illness as though it were some sort of wall I built up around myself. Or, rather, the breakdown of that wall, with each stone I so meticulously placed destroyed, shattered. Me: exposed. Before that wall, I felt no remorse, my actions were justified, I had no guilt, only experience. 

Now I fall asleep to the image of people pleading with me, and me being ruthless with them and now I realise I enjoyed it. And though I feel no remorse, I feel horror. I bake muffins and I feel horror. I bathe in horror. I clothe myself in horror. I am horrified too at the thought of being tamed, of being docile.

And these are the things I cannot, do not, share. These are the things I can barely articulate to myself. An endless ocean made of what is opposite to substance. A glassy blue surface betraying nothing of the depth to which the void extends, which I have filled with the voices of drowning men, with the hollow men, the stuffed men. 

The call of the sea is a strong one. 

The wall got knocked down. He was there to pick up the pieces and now there is no “I” without him. What would I do if I lost him? Die, probably. Not pine to death, like one of Tennyson’s women. No, violently and suddenly. There would be nothing left. He doesn’t understand this. I know how he loves me: he loves me like a drug. 

I love him viciously, violently, vindictively, vehemently. I want to eat him whole. I want to inhabit him. I love him so much I want to reach into his chest and palpate his heart myself, forever, so my movement sustains him, and so he has no choice but to go when I do. 

These are not sane thoughts. These are the things I do not, will not share. I want to be free to destroy pawns so I can spare him. A game of chess. What shall I do now? What shall I do? I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street with my hair down, so. 

What do I aspire to? I’ve seen life and I’ve seen death. And I’ve seen cities with faces like men, and men with faces like cities. I’ve played Demeter and Persephone, and Helen and Leda, and sometimes I played Hercules and Orpheus, too. 

Once, I may have been a pomegranate. 

I feel like I am missing something, but my line of sight will not stretch far enough to show me what shape the hollow is. 

What shall I do now? What shall I do? Bake a batch of muffins, and act like everything is ordinary, until everything is ordinary. I shall fill the sea with Scylla and Charybdis, with siren songs and with Calypso, with old academics and their books, with Russian poets, with young philosophers. I will fill the sea with apple and cinnamon and cover it all in glass, and I shall tread on it until it becomes ice. And when the snow comes, I will wait until it has covered all the blood. I will wait. I grow old. I will build not a wall but a floor this time.


End file.
